They don’t have a password for the one where the feeder video is stored.
“So how do we get in?” Jimmy asks. “And good luck trying to get a court order that Apple ever gives a shit about when someone is trying to storm the privacy barricade.”
“You forget something,” Danny Esposito says. “I already hacked into Jane’s phone as a way of keeping track of her.”
“Another gift?” Jimmy asks.
“Bet your ass,” Esposito says.
“You figure out a way in and I might kiss you,” Jimmy says.
“Wait,” Esposito says, “that’s your idea of a pep talk?”
It takes a couple more hours, but eventually they gain access to Carson’s files. At one point Esposito says, “Check this out,” touching his index finger to the screen.
“All I’m seeing is numbers,” Jimmy says.
“This is a bank account I bet even the lovely Mrs. Carson didn’t know existed,” Esposito says. “It turns out that old Hank did pay Sonny back before he died.”
Esposito needs more time to sort through Carson’s files and all their various hidey-holes, a lot of them containing very detailed accounts of what a shitty gambler he’d been, Esposito bitching every time he would end up going down another rabbit hole.
Finally, Danny Esposito says, “NowI’llbe damned.”
Both of their noses are nearly touching the screen. They turn to look at each other, then back at the screen, and the images on it. Two men, captured on the camera from the bird feeder, walking in through the back door of the Carson house, guns out. The time stamp lines up perfectly withthe evening of the murders. And this time stamp, they both know, is real.
Jimmy puts up his hand and Esposito gives him a soft high-five.
“Gotcha,” Jimmy says to the images of Eric Jacobson and Edmund McKenzie on the screen in front of them.
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN
THE BIG-ASSED HOUSE, OVERLOOKING Mecox Bay in Water Mill, is only a few miles from where Paul Harrington, once the head dirty cop of Sonny Blum’s squad of dirty cops, lived and died.
By now Jimmy and Esposito have called Jane to tell her what they’ve got and who they’ve got and where they’re going, before heading to the Southampton Town Police to pick up an arrest warrant.
“This one we do by the book,” Esposito says. “This arrest ain’t getting tossed the way Harrington’s was.”
“Gee, I sure hope they don’t resist,” Jimmy says from the passenger seat.
“Wouldn’t that be a crying fucking shame?” Danny Esposito says.
Jimmy smiles to himself. This is what it was like in the old days, with his partner Mickey Dunne, sitting in the front seat of the car and closing in on something big.
Looking to close something, period.
There is one car parked in the driveway, the one with the tracking device that led them straight here.
They drive a quarter mile or so up the street and park, then walk back to the house. By now they both have their guns out.
“You think they’ll be armed?” Esposito says, sounding almost hopeful.
“Probably,” Jimmy Cunniff says quietly. “Armed and stupid.”
Jimmy says he’ll go around to the back. He tries the back door and finds it unlocked. As he eases himself into the kitchen, he hears rock music coming from the front of the house.
Jimmy keeps his Glock out in front of him as he silently makes his way through the kitchen and into a small dining room, betting on it being just the two of them inside.
He stops before he gets to the open door at the far end of the dining room and sees the two of them, facing each other on matching couches, a giant bottle of Tito’s vodka on the coffee table between them, the bottle set in a crystal ice bucket. Nothing but the best for these rich assholes.
